Installing xp on a sata drive connected to a pci card

possible?

yes

no

difficult

a fifth grader could do it.

I am using a dell dimension 8200 with 2gb of memory. the bios does not support sata. i installed a sata pci card for a dvd burner and now want to add a sata drive and install xp onto the sata drive. the current operating system recognizes the sata devices. i boot from the ide cdrom drive with the windows xp cd and press f6 at the right time and load the drivers i downloaded from the silicon image website. i have the silicon image si3114 card. the drivers are loaded but when the list of drives available to install windows only the ide drives are shown. the sata drive is not listed. this drive is formatted and partitioned into one 150gb partition and the rest in another partition.
another curious thing is that the system will not boot normally. if i let it default it will go to the press f1 or f2. i can press f12 for a boot menu and boot from the list of devices, sata dvd, ide dvd, or ide hard drive. i choose hard drive and it boots fine and recognizes all the drives ide and sata.

Why don't you just use a IDE to SATA converter adapter they are cheap?http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816114 you'll need a power extension lead too http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812530006 If your wanting to delete the O/S from the current HDD and replace it with the New one then wipe the old HDD and put it in the RAID configuration to use it as storage because the New one is bigger then you will need two of them. :slurp:
Alternatively use the new larger HDD to back up your old one 'insitu' formatted NTFS ! I would suggest that if your going to load any games onto this HDD connect it directly to the MoBo, just to load the game otherwise the RAID will tend to scatter the program load files 'all over the HDD' which will make playing lag. It will be fine to play game / save game as the transfer rates of the converter / adapter are above IDE transfer rates
Are you trying to run two different Bootable Windows O/S on the one computer?
You should not have any problems with the si3114 card loading once you've set it up correctly. Mine posts fine right after the initial system post with a registered 931Kb (1Tb). It does not need extra drivers they are already installed, earlier drivers should be installed already as Daisy-chain drives have been around since the 80's and the card will have it's own latest drivers in it's own independently loading BIOS post